I
am the eldest son of the eldest son of the T Bowen Rees who crops up
regularly in connection with the church in Boudjah, and have inherited
some of the family papers both for the Rees family and for the Werry
family who came to Smyrna when Francis Werry was made Consul for the
Levant Company at the end of the eighteenth century. Reading these documents
gave me the impetus for the book.

Incidentally, I have always understood the word “Levant” to be the French
word meaning “rising”, referring to the lands in which, for Western
Europeans, the sun rose. It is still used in my area of Bordeaux by
vine-growers to indicated the direction of the sun, ie. East, and West
is indicated by the word “Couchant”, meaning “setting” (literally, lying
down).

SYNOPSIS

MERCHANT ADVENTURERS IN THE LEVANT:

A chronicle of two families’ involvement with the Levant over three
centuries

The book is about an area of commercial and diplomatic significance
to Britain for centuries - the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly Turkey
and Egypt, otherwise known as the Levant - from the late seventeenth
century to the Suez crisis of 1956. It does this by tracing, with much
personal detail, the record of two British families, linked by marriage,
whose lives for nine generations were bound up with the Levant as sea-captains,
traders, consular officials and entrepreneurs. Use is made of published
sources, but I have been able to draw on unpublished papers and correspondence
in family possession as well as on privately published material. During
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a large published literature
on the Levant, but it was almost exclusively directed at the indigenous
peoples, the history and the archaeology of the area, and ignored the
European Levantine population. This is true even of writers like Freya
Stark and Rose Macaulay. Across the Hellespont (Hutchinson 1987) by
Richard Stoneman is a very readable introduction to this literature.
There is a good professional History of the Levant Company by A C Wood
(Frank Cass 1964), but this only takes the reader up until 1823, and
it is short on personal histories and background. Bright Levant (John
Murray 1970) by Laurence Grafftey-Smith is a lively account of Egypt
in the first part of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on politics
and diplomacy: it complements a similar but earlier account by Sir Ronald
Storrs of his time in Egypt as a young diplomat, later Oriental Secretary,
in the early years of the century (Orientations, Ivor Nicholson &
Watson 1937). The focus of the present book on the continuing British
involvement in the area in the form of two linked families over nine
generations will be of interest not only to professional historians,
but as much or more to general readers, who for historical, literary
or family reasons are curious about the European connection with the
Near and Middle East over the last three centuries. The manuscript runs
to 80,000 words.

Outline

Before ever the East India Company was given its Royal Charter to monopolise
trade between Britain and India, a powerful predecessor had been trading
with Turkey, the realm of the Grand Signior, for two decades. This was
the Levant Company, whose twelve founding members were given a royal
Patent by Queen Elizabeth 1st in 1581 to trade with Turkey. All other
English subjects were prohibited from trading in the dominions of the
Turkish sultan. The monopoly lasted for more than two hundred years.
During the course of these centuries, the commerce between the two realms
expanded enormously, creating wealth at home and established interests
and communities overseas for the English. In the process, British political
interest and influence was slowly extended into the countries of the
Near and Middle East, and much of the basis was laid for the nineteenth
century British domination of the area, though little of it ever became
formally part of the British empire. The book chronicles the part played
in this process by the Werry family, originally of Cornwall, from the
late seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, and their
successors, the Rees family from Carmathen in Wales, who married into
the last generation of Werrys.

Sea-captains and adventurers, four generations of Werrys sailed ships
for the Levant company around the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean.
In time of peace the ships carried cargoes for City merchants to Smyrna,
Aleppo and Alexandretta; in more troubled times - and there were many
of these - they held letters of marque from the Crown and fought as
privateers, licensed pirates who were entitled to fly the English flag
and prey on enemy shipping. They also served from the early eighteenth
century onwards as Brethren of Trinity House, the great corporation
for merchant seamen which effectively ran the Port of London in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and built and manned the lighthouses
round our coasts, from the time of the first wooden lighthouse on the
Eddystone Rock built at the end of the seventeenth century. Links between
the merchant seamen of Trinity House and the Levant Company were inevitably
strong, and in due course Francis Werry, the fourth generation of sea-captains,
became the Levant Company’s last Consul in its most important overseas
trading port, Smyrna (modern Izmir) in Turkey. The second and third
chapters of the book cover his life. Mr Consul Werry spent the 1780s
and 90s as a merchant sea-captain and privateer before his appointment
to the Smyrna post in 1794. There he lived through the Napoleonic Wars
and the turbulent years of the Greek struggle for independence, supplying
intelligence to Nelson and the other admirals of the British fleet,
protecting, sometimes through force of arms, the British community from
the attacks of the Turkish mob, entertaining a host of British travelers
on their wanderings, among them Byron and his friend Hobhouse. The tension
between the Levant Company’s commercial and diplomatic functions, which
contributed to its eventual demise, emerges regularly in the Consul’s
dealings with the British Government and navy. Nonetheless when the
Levant Company’s charter was finally revoked in 1823, he was kept on
by the government as HM Consul in Smyrna, the first British, as opposed
to Levant Company, consul in the city. His vivid reports, first to the
Levant Company, then to the Foreign Office, are held in the Public Record
Office in London and illuminate this period of rapid political change,
when opinion in England about the merits of the Greek insurrection was,
at any rate initially, much divided.

Chapters 4-8 are based on the memoirs,
privately published (copies are held in the British Library) of Consul
Werry’s son Francis Peter (1788 - 1859), a young diplomat, who joined
the Foreign Office in 1811 and was present at or on the fringes of the
great events of the end of the war with Napoleon, culminating in the
Congress of Vienna, where he served under Castlereagh and Wellington.
His friend and patron was William Hamilton, not the complaisant husband
of Emma Hamilton, but the secretary of Lord Elgin of the famous marbles,
and a founder and future President of the Royal Geographical Society.
Francis Peter was originally of interest to the Foreign Office because
of his knowledge of Turkey and the Levant. To us his attraction lies
partly in his struggles, as a young man without the powerful connections
which were then indispensable to advancement in a diplomatic career,
to make his way in the aristocratic milieu of the European courts to
which he was attached. But it also lies in his lively pen, which gives
a particularly engaging account of life in English society in the Levant
at the end of the eighteenth century, and shows how soon that extraordinary
mixture of languages, religions and cultures which characterised Levantine
society had evolved. At the age of fifteen, as William Hamilton's companion,
he traveled across Asia Minor exploring the ancient classical sites,
recording the wild landscapes in which hyenas and the occasional leopard
were still to be found, and staying with Turks, Greeks and other Levantines.
After a short exile in Malta with the British community from Smyrna
in 1809, during a time of political and military tension with Turkey,
he returned to Istanbul, still policed by its Circassian janissaries,
where he found legends from the time of the Byzantine emperors still
alive in the mouths of the Greek clergy, and witnessed the recapture
of some runaway Turkish slaves. Two years later, put surreptitiously
ashore by a British man-of-war on the coast of Sicily, he was rescued
by a Sicilian prince before making his way to London, and to the eventual
haven of a post with the Foreign Office. A posting to St Petersburg
was followed by duties at the two great conferences of Chatillon and
Vienna where the shape of post-Napoleonic Europe was hammered out. His
subsequent diplomatic career was a sad anti-climax. Appointed HM Chargé
des Affaires at the Court of Dresden, he clashed with the British envoy,
John Morier, son of his father’s old friend Isaac Morier, the Levant
Company’s Consul-General in Istanbul, and both men were forced to take
early retirement.

Chapters 9-14 describe the arrival on the scene in Turkey and subsequent
fortunes of the Rees family of St Clears in Carmathenshire. The first
of these was Thomas Bowen Rees, who arrived just in time to be present
in the Crimea during the war with Russia, and whose son, also called
Thomas Bowen Rees, married the eldest surviving Werry girl in the last
generation of that family to bear the name. Through that union many
of the family papers on which this book is based have been passed down.
The Rees family were characteristic of the new kind of independent business
adventurer who flourished in the Victorian area. Of relatively humble
origins - the family in St Clears had kept one of the shops in that
small town - they had none of the connections of wealth or family which
were a prerequisite for those seeking to become members of the Levant
Company in the days of that company’s monopoly of the Turkish trade.
The first Thomas Bowen Rees went out as a representative for one of
the Manchester cotton manufacturers, making and losing a fortune in
the cotton and dyestuffs trades. Significantly, it was the assertion
of British naval power in the Mediterranean which allowed him to redeem
the family fortunes by landing a contract to victual the British fleet
in the Black Sea in the last two decades of the century. His gradual
transformation into a Levantine was symbolised by his marriage to a
half-American, half-English Smyrna girl whose correspondence with her
“English” mother was carried on in French, and whose first language
was almost certainly Greek. Fortune having foiled their original plan
to retire to England, the couple finished their days in Smyrna.

Chapter 10 illustrates how the extension of British military and naval
power, first into Cyprus, then into Egypt provided further opportunities
for British entrepreneurs. Among these were Thomas Rees’s three sons.
In Cyprus, they shared a house at one stage with the young Lieutenant
Kitchener, while he was carrying out a survey of the island and
they were supplying the British army of occupation. In Egypt, they were
present at the siege of Alexandria in 1882 and at the closing stages
of Arabi Pasha’s revolt. Thence they went down the Nile to Khartoum,
where they were engaged in supplying the British Army under Lord Wolseley,
attempting (vainly) to rescue General Gordon. The headquarters of the
British army and administration was in Cairo, where they all returned
after the end of the campaign. One son remained in Cairo until his early
death at the age of 29; he became briefly a newspaper proprietor, started
a company for dredging the Suez Canal, backed his younger brother’s
shipping business newly starting up in Turkey, while at the same time
continuing his contracting business with the British army. A passionate
gentleman rider, his favourite Arab remained unbeaten at the Cairo race
club until a British thoroughbred was sent across the sea to put the
local bloodstock in its place. Meanwhile the two younger brothers, now
in Alexandria and Smyrna respectively, carved out their own business
careers, the one as a supplier to the British fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean,
the other as the founder of a small line of cargo ships. All three illustrate
the variety of opportunities which British arms, on land and on sea,
had brought to entrepreneurs in the Levant.

Chapters 11-14 trace the fortunes of family of the youngest of the brothers,
Thomas Bowen Rees, husband of Zoe Theophanie Werry, the last and eccentric
heiress of the Werry name and effects. They illustrate how the Europeans
of the Levant were able to survive and indeed to some extent profit by
the buffetings of the 1914-18 War, despite temporary exile from Turkey,
now an enemy nation; and how the conflict between Greece and Turkey in
1923 finally put paid to the favourable regime which foreigners living
and trading in Turkey had enjoyed to a greater or lesser degree since
the Byzantine era. Some Europeans managed to hang on to their businesses
for a while yet, and the old European villages [archive views of Boudjah, the former Rees house]
on the outskirts of what was no longer Smyrna, but Izmir, continued to
flourish [views of the former Rees
office building - internal ornaments]
until the second World War, though with waning vitality. Steadily though
the commercial life of the European communities ebbed away, much of it
moving for a time to Alexandria, in Egypt, until that too was brought
to an abrupt end by the failed attempt by Britain and France, in collaboration
with Israel, to seize the Suez Canal back from Colonel Nasser in 1956.
The Rees family, with close ties by now to a considerable number of the
other European merchant families of the Levant, kept a connection with
Turkey to the very end, and there are attractive descriptions of the life
both there and in their new base of Alexandria. Their role as, once again,
victuallers of the British forces during the Dardanelles campaign is described,
as is the rise of the New Egypt and Levant Shipping Company [details] which they
founded, and their connection with Eugene Eugenides, the “Smyrna merchant”
who figures in T S Eliot’s disparaging
verse in the Waste Land. But all this is set in the context of the
colourful social world of the Levant, with its great variety of languages,
nationalities and origins. The family’s final legacy to that world lay,
perhaps, in the work of Noel Rees, grandson of the Thomas Bowen Rees who
emigrated from Carmathen. Appointed British Vice-Consul in Izmir in 1941,
more than a hundred years after his great-great-great-grandfather Francis
Werry had retired as British Consul in that city, he organised the escape
of hundreds of Allied soldiers and airmen, and thousands of Greeks, from
the islands of Greece and the mainland, after the German occupation of
those territories. By then commissioned into the RNVR and head of MI9
in Izmir, he had the satisfaction of accepting the surrender of the German
forces in the Dodecanese, islands adjacent to those which, during Consul
Werry’s tenure, more than a hundred years previously, had been taken under
British protection.

Tom Rees 2004

Merchant Adventurers in the Levant, ISBN 0-9545566-1-5, 244 pages, 31 illustrations
(7 colour). Book sold out in 2006 - segment.

Notes: 1- In publications post-mortem of Noel Rees, there little mention of the man and his work with the escape network he helped establish. One book that mentions him is ‘MI9: Escape and Evasion 1939-1945, M.R.D. Foot & J.M. Langley - Book Club Associates, London, 1979’, but the details are scant - segment:2- In October 2009 the researcher George Poulimenos kindly provided me with a summary article on the book to be published in the future detailing the exploits of George Miniotis during WWII, who operated under the command of Noel Rees.
3- The T. Bowen Rees & Co. were in addition to managing their own ships, agents to a variety of maritime companies, for example as shown in this advert: In addition the company also had a part to play in the evacuation of refugees from Smyrna in 1922 as this newspaper image shows:
4- The history of yachting in Turkey, in which the Rees family were always prominent, is covered by an article penned by Brian Giraud, submitted in February, 2010, viewable here:
5- In February 2012 Tom Rees submitted an article written earlier concerning ‘Some British diplomatic travellers in Turkey 1801-12’, which includes two Levantine characters amongst it players: Jack Morier and Francis Peter Werry.